


Heart of Broken Glass

by lol-phan-af (lol_phan_af)



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Diary/Journal, F/M, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lost Love, M/M, Multi, Past Character Death, Suicide, its not in that Format but it is a Feature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 09:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12078498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lol_phan_af/pseuds/lol-phan-af
Summary: Losing people was never easy. Having someone you let past the cages and dental floss, wire and deadbolts and padlocks, and having them be ripped out of all of it, leaving the outline of their body in your heart, feels like something akin to dying yourself. Learning how to deal with that, how to get up and walk again after they have brought you to your knees feels like pushing yourself up a mountain that's impossible to climb.Lafayette met Alex, and they knew they were going to lose him the second his lips stretched themselves into a smile and he told them his name.





	Heart of Broken Glass

Lafayette's heart was a cage locked up as tight as it could be, deadbolts and padlocks and anything else to keep what little they have left close to them, to keep everyone who might take what little they have left of themself for their own.  
  
They'd been losing pieces their entire life, for their father, their mother, grandmother, for their best friend who said they were going on vacation for the summer and never came back. A piece of their heart for the letters she sent before she left, shoved back in their envelopes and tied in one bundle with dental floss and wire, thrown in the back of their closet where they're too afraid to go. A shard thrown out for past loves that left them behind, crushing it under their feet without any care or consideration, abandoning the person who loved them with all they had.  
  
Lafayette's heart was a glass mosaic of pieces they'd stolen from other people, desperate to fill the parts of themself that went missing, that were taken or given up. They wanted to feel _whole_ again, to feel like the person they never were, to feel like a person at all.  
  
"You are fine, just the way you are," their grandmother told them, running her hands through their hair.  
  
Lafayette did not say what they wanted to, didn't argue. They didn't stand up and scream about how they felt, how they destroyed everything and how everything destroyed them, the toxic relationship between them and the entire universe that just seemed to push down on their heart, on their body, on the very core of their being until they were nothing but dust trying, more than anything, to disappear.  
  
They laid a rose on her coffin not long after that day, and their heart handed over a piece of itself in her name, a piece that couldn't be replaced.  
  
Losing people was never easy. Having someone you let past the cages and dental floss, wire and deadbolts and padlocks, and having them be ripped out of all of it, leaving the outline of their body in your heart, feels like something akin to dying yourself. Learning how to deal with that, how to get up and walk again after they have brought you to your knees feels like pushing yourself up a mountain that's impossible to climb.  
  
Lafayette met Alex, and they knew they were going to lose him the second his lips stretched themselves into a smile and he told them his name.  
  
His name was like the sun shining through the holes in Lafayette's glass heart, and the way his voice curled around the syllables was enough to unlock the doors, to let himself in without asking, without being invited. He wasn't invited to be loved by them, but Lafayette did it anyway. They knew they were going to lose him, and they loved him anyway.  
  
Loving Alex felt like laughing for the first time, felt like being a person for the first time, and Lafayette felt like they could stand on top of the world, breathe in stardust and the infinite vacuum of space and look over to see Alex smiling there, sunshine smile and eyes bright like the moon staring back at them, filling their lungs with galaxies of things they never felt before.  
  
Alex was made of shattered glass and bent metal, had knives buried in knuckles and gasoline running through his veins. Lafayette wanted to take his broken pieces and make him whole again, he deserved to be whole again, but he couldn't just _stop_ being who he was. That was the entire _point_ .  
  
Alex wrote in journals, filled them with thoughts and diagrams and sketches of sunsets and Lafayette and the chair in the living room he never wanted to leave some days. He drew the bed they sleep in, Lafayette's car, his glasses next to a tube of Lafayette's lipstick on their bedside table. He pencils in floorplans and marks off every place they've fucked, but made it clear that was not its original intention. Lafayette never knew his original intentions.  
  
He wrote everything in that journal, planned arguments out and jotted down grocery lists. Schedules and parts of songs he liked, everything he had to do before he died. Lafayette can't read it because it's written in Spanish for exactly that reason, but they watch as the bullet points lessen in number, until they find an open journal, a heading and a blank page, Alex's body sprawled out on the chair he drew so much.  
  
Lafayette knew they would lose him, and when they did he took everything. Every piece of their heart that they had left, and it wasn't many, he stole from them in the moment, reaching into their throat and pulling them out with his knuckles like blades and left Lafayette as empty as the pill bottle still clutched in his hand.  
  
There were two journals he kept up most often, that no matter how much he wrote, never finished. The first was the one they found with his body, and the second was one tucked under his arm, that they couldn't force themself to take until a paramedic handed it to them and they were forced to look at their name in his handwriting on the cover.  
  
His final will and testament make up the first page, and everything went to them except the suit he kept in the back of their closet, the one he said he would never wear. He asked to be buried in it.  
  
Alex told them where he kept all his journals, the ones that seemingly disappeared once the last page had been marked, and Lafayette crawled under his bed and pulled the box out, dumping journals filled to the brim with letters and poems and observations, journals titled _Eliza_ , and _Rachel_ , _James_ , _James II_ , _James M._ , _Angelica_ , _Hercules_ , _Thomas_ , and Lafayette didn't know what to do with them. _Washington_ , _John_ , _John_ , _Lafayette_ , _Lafayette_ , _Lafayette_ .  
  
They were all tales of people he loved and lost or loved and lost him, people he fell out of love with. People he knew, people he wanted to know better, about how, if only things were different, they could've loved each other.  
  
There were no goodbyes in these journals, no apologies that he wished he'd been strong enough to be there for them. Just his heart, exposed in its chicken wire and paper mache framework. Childhood photos littering _Rachel_ and _James_ and _James II_ , pressed flowers and a nail polish swatch from the bottle Alex never admitted to owning in _Eliza_ , the last page cloaked in the deep red in marker scented like cherry.  
  
Lafayette leafed through all of them that night, in Alex's empty apartment, pulled apart pages and read about the details of his love for _James M_ ., how his smile felt like something Alexander could never admit he wanted, how _Thomas_ and _James M_ . looked at him like they knew what he thought when he saw them, how his heart overflowed with anger and something he couldn't admit to his own reflection let alone them.  
  
Apologies to _Angelica_ , of hurting her sister, hurting her, notes and lists of everything beautiful and amazing about her, a pink hair tie she gave him taped in the right hand corner with a smiley face in the middle of the circle. Explanations of how, when she spoke, the words inked themselves onto Alex's skin and stuck with him until she said something new. The last page is another apology, written in the same cherry red marker, dried out from _Eliza_ and the words _I'm sorry_ , scrawled in barely there writing.  
  
_Hercules_ and _Washington_ , and how Alex loved them but didn't want to, how they loved him back and Alex felt so terrible, pages ripped out in the middle, so many that the centers of these journals were hollow, their covers sloping downward, the same angle of Alex's arm on their living room chair and Lafayette can't make their way through these. They pack them away first, and everything else goes on top of them, of the descriptions of a love offered to Alexander, so full and pure, and the harrowing reasons he turned them away because of who he thought he was.  
  
Two _John_ 's, the first bursting so full it has to be held together with rubber bands. It was no dental floss and wire, but Lafayette had to admit it was easier to unravel. Pictures fell out, polaroids of Alex and a man with emerald green eyes, covered in freckles, as happy as they could be. Photos of intertwined hands, an empty bed that was not Alex's, of John sleeping, laughing, standing in front of an ice cream shop. Poems and poems and statements of love overflowing from Alexander like he didn't know where to _put_ it all. It was a love beyond compare, it was the love Alexander deserved.  
  
The second _John_ , turned the first one on his head. A photo of a group of people standing outside a church, of a man who looked like John but older talking someone unidentified, of a tombstone and of a bouquet of flowers. A picture of John next to a wreath of flowers. The letters to him in this were angry ones, save for sixteen pages after a picture of his grave, an obituary. John Laurens was apparently a great man, and Lafayette would've loved to have met him.  
  
The last page of John's second journal is dedicated to Lafayette, and it asks him to not be upset.  
  
_They make me as happy as you did, I only hope I don't fuck it up. Yours, Alex._  
  
Lafayette hugs that page close to their chest and packs it with _Hercules_ and _Washington_ and the first edition of _John_ . He piles the rest on top of them, and they want to stand up and go to their living room and pull Alex into their arms, embracing the parts of him that he never showed them, but _Alex wasn't there anymore_ .  
  
They took the journals to his funeral, placed them next to him and watched as photographs came to life, as Eliza and Angelica and Hercules and Washington stepped in one by one and Lafayette felt like an imposter staring at people who would tear them apart at first glance. James M. and Thomas came in, hands clasped in one another's and Lafayette wondered if they would've taken Alex if he told them how he felt.  
  
"Did you know Alex?" Angelica asked as she sat next to them in the pew, and the disdain Alex wrote about seemed to have melted away. Lafayette nodded but couldn't find the courage to look at her.  
  
"He was my boyfriend," they whispered, and Angelica's eyebrows shot to her forehead.  
  
"Really?"  
  
"I know what happened, kind of, with all of you. He, uh," Lafayette reached back and grabbed _Angelica_ , handing it to her. "He wrote it all down."  
  
Lafayette left Alex's funeral with six journals, _John_ and _Lafayette_ . They didn't know if Alex would've wanted that, if he would've wanted his past loves and past friends to see what he thought of them, how he looked them in the eyes and felt nothing but admiration and love and saw nothing but wonder. Everything that went wrong, he blamed himself, and it left the people who came to see him with a clear conscience if only so they wouldn't feel weighed down when they left him.  
  
Lafayette hugged the box close to their chest before setting it on the ground and walking across the street.  
  
They never made it to the other side.

**Author's Note:**

> lmao when you project on alex and then ask yourself why you keep killing him whoop whoop
> 
> tumblr: lol-phan-af


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